Transclick's Translating Parrot Lets Birds of All Feathers Flock Together

OviPublisherSuccesses | 09 June, 2011 15:10

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Transclick, a multilingual messaging and digital translation company headquartered in the United States, has accomplished success in both consumer engagement and download numbers with its free translation app, Translating Parrot. They have had over three million downloads from more than 190 markets and consumers requesting over 100,000 translation requests a day. 
 

 
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Translating Parrot, developed with Java, enables real time translation in 12 different languages. The developer chose to limit the app to 12 languages in order to keep the user interface smooth and easy to navigate on most devices. Languages include:

  • Arabic
  • Chinese
  • English
  • French
  • Hatian-Creole
  • Hebrew
  • Hindi
  • Indonesian
  • Italian
  • Japanese
  • Russian
  • Spanish

A consumer must select two languages, which the app will translate to and from, and can enter up to 100 characters of text. Within a few seconds, the app will translate the text into the selected language. While the app is simple to use and can swiftly interpret short snippets of text, the app's backend process is much more complex.

Translating Parrot, launched in Ovi Store in March 2010, is delivered to consumers in an 80kb package - a surprisingly small memory footprint for such a powerful app. Leveraging cloud technology and a mobile device's access to the internet, Transclick designed Translating Parrot to perform translations on Transclick's remote servers. This prevents the app from using up a device's memory, draining the battery and lowering the overall performance of a device.

Established in 1999 by Robert Levin, founder and CEO, Transclick is headquartered in the United States, and won a grant for speech to speech translation on mobile handsets from the US Army Research Laboratory, which successfully completed in 2006 under the US Small Business Innovation Research Program. Transclick's innovation has not gone unnoticed and has received a number of accolades in the last few years.

The company has been recognized for its mobile-multilingual communications services since it first began to commercialize its technology in 2007 after a patent for subject domain specific translation of email, instant messaging and SMS was issued by the US patent office in 2006. The company was a finalist in Nokia's Growth Economy Venture Challenge in 2010 at Nokia's Developer Summit, a runner-up in The Wall Street Journal Technology Innovation Awards, has been awarded the CTIA Wireless 2007 E-Tech Award for Innovation in Enterprise Solutions, and was named as a Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum.

 


Translating Parrot was developed using the J2ME framework over a period of four months with a team of four developers. Transclick credits Forum Nokia for its superior developer support program.

"Nokia has provided us with greater support than any other platform," said Robert Levin, CEO and founder of Transclick. "The availability of Ovi Store in so many different regions also helps us reach more consumers who can benefit from our translation services."

Downloads from Ovi Store comprise of nearly 75 percent of Translating Parrot's total downloads across all platforms. Transclick credits its success to Ovi Store's global reach to over 190 markets and Ovi Store promotions that feature Translating Parrot on the front landing page. Following Transclick's first Ovi Store promotion in October 2010, the developer saw over 80 percent increase in their total monthly downloads.

To date, Translating Parrot is localized in English and Spanish. Translating Parrot is already a clear worldwide success - receiving downloads of over three million across a number of markets, including France, India, Indonesia, Italy and Saudi Arabia, which comprise nearly 43 percent of Translating Parrot's total traffic. However, Transclick plans to leverage Nokia's global reach in the near future by releasing localized versions of Translating Parrot into five major languages and launching the app in country-specific Ovi Stores in Brazil, China, India, Russia, Thailand, Vietnam, and French and Spanish speaking countries. The apps are being localized into several languages and the company plans to release them in the next several weeks.

"Before releasing our app on Ovi Store, we were only targeting a few countries through large carriers," said Levin. "Thanks to Nokia Ovi Store and Forum Nokia, Transclick was able to leverage Nokia's global reach to gain customer traction in 190 markets. This helps us to fulfill our mission to bring down language barriers everywhere and enable everyone to communicate and collaborate in dozens of languages!"

The company has also seen success with its in-app advertising based monetization model, resulting in revenue growth for the company. Levin comments, "At Transclick, we were amazed by the viral traction that we've achieved all over the world. Our consumer strategy of in-app advertising coupled with our free app downloads in Ovi Store generates significant revenue for our company."

 


In addition to offering Translating Parrot to consumers, Transclick also aims to help businesses as well. "We are now launching our enterprise app as a premium paid version of the successful Transclick consumer app to help large and small companies alike globalize their messaging capacity with higher accuracy than the consumer version," said Levin.

Transclick is in negotiations with several mobile carriers to launch their enterprise channel partner programs. AT&T's Industry and Mobile Alliance Program (IMAP) Enterprise Mobility Ecosystem is the first carrier program to market Transclick's enterprise smartphone client base. Transclick has also developed its own cloud-based translation APIs for businesses to add translation features to their own apps. These APIs enable enterprise apps to translate between 18 or more different languages and provide contextually accurate translations.

In fact, Transclick is the first to market on mobile messaging platforms with technology that is customizable in "sub-language dictionaries" of industry or company-specific terms. Examples of sub-language dictionaries include automotive, business, legal, and medical terminology. Transclick's APIs are intended to facilitate multilingual communication via an intranet, e-mail and even groupware. The customizable translation glossaries also have higher context sensitivity and accuracy.

Watch this video to get an idea of Transclick's translation services:


 
Unlike some competitors who offer similar products, Transclick's APIs can work with any machine translation engine. Transclick also offers human post-editing options for materials that need to be published with rapid turn-around.

Transclick also released their developer SDK to qualified developers who want to create third-party apps that include language translation features. The company is also offering its multi-user networked translation app, called Transclick ChatCat, a capability designed for mobile chat translation between two or more individuals. Everyone in the chat reads the text translation of the conversation in their native language and types in their own language to instantly communicate in the target languages. For more details about this capability, check out this post on Ovi Daily App.

One reviewer wrote, "Great app! Most translations are absolutely spot-on with Translating Parrot. I tested it out on my foreign pals and they didn't need to correct me!"

Translating Parrot is free to download and is compatible with Nokia New Symbian and Symbian (5.0 and 3.x) devices. For a complete overview of all Transclick apps, visit Ovi Store. 

 

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Java ME , Ovi Store , Americas , Cloud Technology | Next | Previous | Comments (1) | Trackbacks (0)

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Nice one

DDrummond9 | 14/06/2011, 15:38

thanks for this wonderful topic

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